Weekly Links #193: history lessons

Oh, hey, look: I estimated correctly for once, and got the wiki migration done as expected. Well, "done". Omissions can be fixed later, and the real work will start once the old website is offline. But for now, I can focus on the newsletter archive and what's left of the game section. So all's well.

In other news, this week Jimmy Maher a.k.a. the Digital Antiquarian reminds us that the world's first interactive movie is 50 years old in 2017 (yes, exactly half a century!) before recounting how analog detective mystery games went on to influence the Full Motion Video (FMV) genre. Always good to know more about the history of your art. Speaking of which, we also have a long read on the history of Spacewar, which was like the third videogame ever created, and marked a surprising number of firsts, not to mention the influence it had on more serious fields of computing. Still in the way of history, we have the second Blade Runner retrospective, this time from Hardcore Gaming 101, and a new history of the first-person shooter from PCGamer, that dares to look at the genre's earliest roots from before Wolfenstein 3D.

Last but not least, via the often excellent Dragonfly BSD Digest, we learn of a website dedicated to pencil and paper games. I used to know about a dozen of them, including ostensible board games that can be played like this, such as Gomoku and Connect-4, so it's good to discover like-minded people.

On this note, I'll leave you enjoy the Sunday. Have fun!